Mia and I have been interested in the art of Ken Scott for quite some time now. We’ve stopped in his gallery in Sisters, OR and even had some rough ideas of which piece(s) we liked.

I had been poking around on Ken’s website late this past week. I found a piece I really liked and texted it to Mia asking what she thought. Upon her agreement with my thoughts I hatched the idea of driving down for a quick weekend to pick up the piece instead of having it shipped via their website. Mia said she was only available to do it this weekend or Halloween weekend. Given that this conversation was taking place on a Thursday late morning I wasn’t sure what we could find in Sisters at such short notice. However Halloween is like Christmas to me and there was no way I was going to miss the chance to scare the daylights hand out candy to kids on the 31st.

A quick search of hotels showed some options but it wasn’t really what we wanted to do. We also didn’t want to do #vanlife for this trip and were looking for a real roof over our heads. I lucked into finding this place right in downtown, less than a 5 minute walk to the art studio and right near Sisters Coffee. Being such a last minute trip we were pretty psyched with the location and amenities offered. I’m not sure I would spend a week in this particular place but two nights was great.

The forecast was calling for mid 70’s and bluebird sky on Saturday with rain moving in for Sunday. I wanted to do a hike in an area we haven’t done before and didn’t want to travel far from Sisters to do it. My typical default search site of Oregon Hikers doesn’t list anything off of 3 Creeks Lake Rd which seemed pretty odd to me since I knew there was mountain biking and XC skiing up there. Some poking around Google brought up the Jefferson View Shelter and some absolutely stunning views of multiple cascade peaks.

We also had to take into account Codi’s abilities. As we discovered during our September vacation our little fuzzball is firmly into his geriatric years. He’s good for around 5(ish) mile hikes now. Water features such as rivers, lakes, ocean, etc greatly increase his fun. This hike is mostly open and very dry as it traverses an area burned in a 2012 wildfire.

We opted to follow the snowshoe route instead of the XC ski route up to the hut. This proved fairly easy given the 12+ foot tall poles used to mark the route. There isn’t always a super obvious trail but it’s easy enough to sightline the next marker and work yourself in that direction.

We reached the hut in less than two miles. By this point I had firmly decided that we need to come back and do this one in the winter with snow!

Unfortunately the hut is day use only. It would be awesome to snowshoe up here in the winter and spend the night with a roof, stove and not that far from your car in case things go sideways. Doesn’t seem like that an overnight is an option but I am already forming plans for a trip back this winter.

Most of the trail signs and markers are up high given how much snow they get up here in the winter months. There are several loop options or if you wanted to keep it simple just a quick out-and-back.

Turns out the “mid 70’s” turned into the high 70’s and we even played with 80F for about an hour. Codi prefers hiking temps in the 50F or under range. We gave him plenty of water and let him rest in the shade now and again. He did well but he was tuckered out by the time we got back to the car.

We got back to the rental house around 1:30pm and spent a good part of the afternoon basking in the sun on the patio and reading. It was a superb way to spend a last minute get away and we couldn’t have asked for better weather!

I don’t have any pictures of our art piece at this time. We haven’t hung it up yet and I will post something about it down the road. In the meantime just enjoy another shot from the hike.

Thanks for reading,

-Pete